Vintage Sewing Machines

A few pictures of vintage sewing machines, that I found in a room at the Walpole Bay Hotel Museum.

I find it hard using my modern machine, so these cranky old machines blew my mind! My mother has a vintage Singer sewing machine, but although old, hers is much more advanced compared to these early designs.

The first machine is a Harris Premier No.1 - Harris did not make sewing machines, but put their name on them and re-distributed them. You can find out more about early Harris sewing machines here. From looking at the information on the website in the link, I can see a Harris number 5 which is dated 1920's, I assume that the Harris No.1 pre-dates this model, so must be nearly 100 years old, if not already 100 years old.

This machine I think is a Singer 'New Family machine', I have identified it from this picture, which shows the machine with 1 spool pin, the machine in my pic has 2 spool pins, but theirs has holes where others should be, very much the same as the one in my pic. It could be as old as 1893

This one is in my mind the oldest sewing machine of the lot. It looks really basic and more like a bit of agricultural machinery than a sewing machine! I didn't think I would be able to identify this one, but have found a picture of it in an image search. It's a Jones 'Serpentine' sewing machine from around 1883 or before 1883 as the information says that in 1883 the leaf pattern changed to 'ornate vine leaves' and these are not vine leaves. Check out this antique sewing machine here.

The room was full of all sorts of other old stuff too, gas masks from WW2, various scrubbing devices to wash clothes, old lamps and other outdated 'technology'.

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